Heretofore symbol recognition systems processed all of the data presented without data exclusion, and the character was either recognized or not recognized. The recognition sequence was a single processing step in which the input symbol data was compared with a reference library of possible symbols. The result of the comparison was either pass or fail without any provision for reliability weighting with confidence factors. U.S. Pat. No. 4,817,176 issued Mar. 28, 1989 to Marshall et al, discloses such a prior art pattern recognition technique.